Need help with ECE, Warps Face

[Bonnie Lass]

I've been using the face included in the Sanhoshin Beauty Pack for quite some time. ECE has much better body sliders than RaceMenu does, so I wanted to start using that. However, whenever I open the race menu with ECE active, no matter what configuration I go with, it really seems to mess with my character's face a lot and she does not look the same.

 

Is there any way around this? 

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

Not really, no. ECE uses its own set of facegen head meshes - and they tend to be chinless, for reasons I cannot fathom, and have an oddly "squashed" appearance (also seen in many people's characters where they have not used the sliders to correct this - for reasons I cannot fathom). You can work the face back towards a resemblance of the way you feel your character should be, but be prepared for the nose to repeatedly revert to the ECE headmesh default if you press the wrong key (I don't know why that bug needs to be present). Yes, it has more sliders than CharGen Extension, which is a great feature, but it's a much more twitchy mod - you can still make a good character using it, but it can sometimes take a *LOT* of patience. If you really feel you *have* to use ECE, then to a certain extent you will have to accept that your character's face will always appear *slightly* different to the way you originally made it.

[Guest]

While it indeed takes more time to get a decent looking face with ECE's sliders (the chin tends to often look rectangular which fortunately can be fixed with ECE's vertex edit) I've yet to encounter the "twitchiness" of the mod. Are you using Race Menu together with ECE? Because I do not and my character's face always stays the way it should be.

[Dagimpyman]

I think the problem here is that ECE uses .tri files that are somewhat different from the vanilla ones, which has these two consequences described above:

 

1) Your face will look a little differently because the morph saved in the .tri file is different - nothing you can do here, unless you replace the .tri files, in which case ECE won't work anymore; if you know how to mess with .tri files, I guess you can try to alter them in blender or 3dsmax or whatever to assume the morph you like.

 

2) Because faceparts are arranged differently in the .tri file, faceparts like nose, mouth, and eyes will "reset" once you open the race menu - what you can do here is just remember which faceparts you were using for your character's face before opening the racemenu, then use the nose/mouth/eye sliders to find them again (you'll probably need to remember the shape, not the number since ECE assigns them new numbers; I guess you can make a picture of your face beforehand to use as a reference).

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

2) Because faceparts are arranged differently in the .tri file, faceparts like nose, mouth, and eyes will "reset" once you open the race menu - what you can do here is just remember which faceparts you were using for your character's face before opening the racemenu, then use the nose/mouth/eye sliders to find them again (you'll probably need to remember the shape, not the number since ECE assigns them new numbers; I guess you can make a picture of your face beforehand to use as a reference).

 

This last one raises a good point - I *ALWAYS* keep a set of pics showing all of the exact feature choices & slider positions for my characters in case something like this happens.

 

[Bonnie Lass]

When I use RaceMenu and ECE together, the face messes up a bit less, not sure why. The sliders I want are still there.

 

Using ECE alone though, it really messes everything up.

 

Maybe I should just switch what face I use, are there any good places to download good ECE-compatible faces?